CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M BAIT & SWITCH
H&R Block deceived users with ‘free’ online tax filing ad, feds say in lawsuit

Tanasia Kenney
Mon, February 26, 2024 

Tax preparer H&R Block “deceptively” pushed ads promising free online tax filings, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Now, it’s the subject of a federal complaint.

The commission is suing the tax prep giant over claims it deleted users’ tax data when they opted for less-expensive products, forcing them to restart the filing process from scratch, per a Feb. 23 news release.

Further, H&R Block is accused of marketing its online filing products as “free” — though that wasn’t the case for many users, the FTC said.

“H&R Block designed its online products to present an obstacle course of tedious challenges to consumers, pressuring them into overpaying for its products,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in the release.

“Today’s action demonstrates that companies using coercive techniques that harm consumers can expect to hear from the FTC.”
‘Fair and transparent pricing’

H&R Block responded to the complaint, saying it provides filers with “unmatched tax expertise, and fair and transparent pricing.”

“The multitude of resources we offer to all filers via educational resources, free tools, and calculators, and The Tax Institute demonstrates our commitment to making filing your taxes more accessible and more transparent for all,” Dara Redler, chief legal officer for H&R Block, told McClatchy News in a statement.

In its complaint, the FTC accused H&R Block of forcing filers to pay for pricier products they didn’t need or that weren’t required for their particular tax situation.

Once users realized they didn’t need that particular product, H&R Block made it difficult to “downgrade” to a cheaper service, federal officials said.

 In this Feb. 14, 2018, file photo, H&R Block signs are displayed in Jackson, Miss. Congressional Democrats are accusing big tax preparation firms including Intuit and H&R Block of undermining the federal government’s upcoming electronic free-file tax return system, and are demanding lobbying, hiring and revenue data to determine what’s going on. 

(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

The complaint further alleged that customers looking to switch to a more budget-friendly option offered by H&R Block were required to call the company’s customer support line. All their tax information submitted up to that point was erased, the FTC said, and users were forced to restart the tax filing process.

“This stands in contrast to the upgrade process, where consumers’ data seamlessly moves to the more expensive product instantly,” according to federal officials.

What’s more, the FTC said H&R Block promised “free” online filing for users with simple returns but “has changed its definition of a ‘simple return’ multiple times in recent years.”

In a statement, Redler said H&R Block gives users the option to switch to a cheaper DIY Product “via multiple mechanisms while ensuring the preparation of accurate tax returns.”

It’s just the latest lawsuit against the tax prep company. In 2023, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sued H&R Block after it was accused of sharing Missourians’ sensitive tax data with tech giants, including Meta, the Kansas City Star reported.

More recently, the tax giant agreed to pay $141 million to settle claims it steered some users to upgrade to its paid tax filing service when they qualified for a free version offered to those who earned less than the IRS’s income limit, according to The Los Angeles Times.

H&R Block denied any wrongdoing in that case, the newspaper reported.

Sexual and reproductive health and rights in Europe: a mixed picture of progress and challenges calls for robust action and commitment

STRASBOURG 27/02/2024

“Charting the progress made towards the full enjoyment of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Europe paints a mixed picture. We can rejoice at notable achievements, but pervasive challenges and deficits as well as new retrogressive developments point to the need for member states to take robust action and remain vigilant and committed”, said today the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, while releasing a report on this topic.

The report entitled ‘Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in Europe: Progress and Challenges’ takes stock of the important multisectoral steps taken since 2017 that have increased access to contraception and abortion care, improved the quality of obstetric care and advanced the provision of comprehensive sexuality education in schools.

It also outlines the negative trends and setbacks in the sphere of sexual and reproductive health and rights and points to the retrogression that has taken place in a few states. It shows how multiple and intersectional discrimination continues to impede the full realisation of sexual and reproductive health and rights of marginalised groups and addresses the considerable challenges human rights defenders working to advance sexual and reproductive health and rights still face in parts of the region.

For each area of concern addressed, the report presents developments in international human rights standards and public health guidelines. It also highlights the COVID-19 pandemic, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation since 2022 and the related cost-of-living crisis as important factors that impacted the developments in the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights.

“Universal access to quality sexual and reproductive health care and the ability to exercise sexual and reproductive autonomy and decision making are integral components of human rights and gender equality”, said the Commissioner while stressing that European states have international human rights obligations to respect, protect and fulfil these rights.

In this framework, the Commissioner presents a series of recommendations, setting out a roadmap aimed at assisting states in ensuring the realisation of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Europe, in compliance with international human rights law and standards.

These include:

• Guaranteeing the provision of comprehensive sexuality education;
• Ensuring availability and accessibility of affordable contraceptive services and evidence-based information on contraception;
• Eliminating remaining barriers and restrictions to guarantee access to quality abortion care including evidence-based information on abortion;
• Ensuring dignified and respectful gynaecological and obstetric care, free from discrimination and violence;
• Establishing effective measures to tackle intersecting forms of discrimination that limit the equal enjoyment of sexual and reproductive health and rights, in particular for women and girls with disabilities, Roma women and girls, older women, refugees, asylum seeking and migrant women, LGBTI people and sex workers;
• Preventing retrogression in the protection of sexual and reproductive health and rights and enabling the work of human rights defenders acting to advance sexual and reproductive health and rights.

The recommendations complement those from the 2017 Issue Paper on ‘Women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights in Europe’ that this report is following-up on.

• Read the report ‘Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in Europe: Progress and Challenges’

Mexico crowns new ‘Queen of the Mountains’ as community reckons with recent mountaineering deaths


Mexico Queen of the Mountains© ASSOCIATED PRESS

On the flanks of a central Mexico volcano, the country’s female mountaineers have chosen a new “Queen of the Mountains,” complete with crown, ice axe and red cape.

The tradition that dates to the 1950s came this year at a somber time for Mexico’s mountaineers, as the tight-knit community was still reckoning with the recent deaths of two people on another mountain, the Pico de Orizaba, the country’s highest.

This year's queen, Mariana García López, a 42-year-old administrator and teacher at the National Technology Institute of Mexico’s Zongolica campus, hails from Orizaba, Veracruz, the gulf coast state that shares the peak with the state of Puebla. She started hiking the mountains of Veracruz 20 years ago and has made several ascents up Orizaba’s different faces.

García López and women from more than 60 mountaineering clubs made their way up the Malinche volcano in central Mexico on Sunday. Normally, her coronation would have occurred at the 14,636-foot (4,461-meter) summit, but after the deaths on Orizaba, mountain rangers tightened requirements for those attempting to summit.

Organizers moved the ceremony lower on the mountain to send a message of safety. They piled their clubs’ flags in front of García López and shouted “Long live Mexican mountaineering!” They pummeled their new queen with snowballs.

The new queen will have a packed schedule. In her role, she will travel to meet the many clubs present and join them on their mountaineering expeditions. As the female face of mountaineering, she will show other women there are no limits to who can reach the country’s highest peaks.

García López said she wants to stress the responsibility of those who go into the mountains and support the restoration of many of the high-elevation shelters that have deteriorated over the years.

“There is a lot of work to be done on the issue of mountaineering,” García López said.

____

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Mexico mountaineers elect new 'Queen of the Mountains'

Associated Press

On the flanks of a central Mexico volcano, the country’s female mountaineers have chosen a new “Queen of the Mountains,” complete with crown, ice pick and red cape. #mexico 

The Rising Cost of the Oil Industry’s Slow Death

 Pump jacks operate at dusk near Loco Hills on April 23, 2020 in Eddy County, New Mexico. - Permian Basin Crude oil extraction is one of the main economic drivers of this area

LONG READ

By Mark Olalde and Nick Bowlin
TPM
February 24, 2024 
This article first appeared at ProPublica and Capital and Main. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. 

In the 165 years since the first American oil well struck black gold, the industry has punched millions of holes in the earth, seeking profits gushing from the ground. Now, those wells are running dry, and a generational bill is coming due.

Until wells are properly plugged, many leak oil and brine onto farmland and into waterways and emit toxic and explosive gasses, rendering redevelopment impossible. A noxious lake inundates West Texas ranchland, oil bubbles into a downtown Los Angeles apartment building and gas seeps into the yards of suburban Ohio homes.

But the impact is felt everywhere, as many belch methane, the second-largest contributor to climate change, into the atmosphere.

There are more than 2 million unplugged oil and gas wells that will need to be cleaned up, and the current production boom and windfall profits for industry giants have obscured the bill’s imminent arrival. More than 90% of the country’s unplugged wells either produce little oil and gas or are already dormant.

By law, companies are responsible for plugging and cleaning up wells. Oil drillers set aside funds called bonds, similar to the security deposit on a rental property, that are refunded once they decommission their wells or, if they walk away without doing that work, are taken by the government to cover the cost.

But an analysis by ProPublica and Capital & Main has found that the money set aside for this cleanup work in the 15 states accounting for nearly all the nation’s oil and gas production covers less than 2% of the projected cost. That shortfall puts taxpayers at risk of picking up the rest of the massive tab to avoid the environmental, economic and public health consequences of aging oil fields.

The estimated cost to plug and remediate those wells if cleanup is left to the government is $151.3 billion, according to the states’ own data. But the actual price tag will almost certainly be higher — perhaps tens of billions of dollars more — because some states don’t fully account for the cost of cleaning up pollution. In addition, regulators have yet to locate many wells whose owners have already walked away without plugging them, known as orphan wells, which states predict will number at least in the hundreds of thousands.

“The data presents an urgent call to action for state regulators and the Department of the Interior to swiftly and effectively update bond amounts,” said Shannon Anderson, who tracks the oil industry’s cleanup as organizing director of the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a nonprofit that advocates for Wyoming communities. Anderson and nine other experts, including petroleum engineers and financial analysts, reviewed ProPublica and Capital & Main’s findings, which were built using records from 30 state and federal agencies.

“We have allowed companies intentionally to do this,” said Megan Milliken Biven, who reviewed the data and is a former program analyst for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a federal regulator of offshore oil rigs, and founder of True Transition, a nonprofit that advocates for oil field workers. “It is the inevitable consequence of an entire regulatory program that is more red carpet than red tape.”


Regulatory agencies in several states maintain that they have adequate tools to protect taxpayers, such as the authority to require companies to post larger bonds as their wells stop producing. Other states are working to reform their bonding systems. Industry representatives, meanwhile, say they have done their part by paying fees on oil production that help fund states’ well-plugging efforts.

“Our industry is taking action every day to address the permanent closure of historic oil and natural gas wells and the remediation of historic well sites in accordance with applicable federal and state laws,” Holly Hopkins, a vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s major trade group, said in a statement.

A graveyard of rusting wells rising from once-picturesque sand dunes near Artesia, New Mexico, tells a more complicated story.


Around the corroding skeletons of pump jacks, the ground is stained black from spills. Leaking hydrogen sulfide, which reeks of rotten eggs, has turned the air toxic, making each breath burn. At the base of one salt-caked well, a sign indicates who is responsible for the mess. Barely legible beneath splattered oil, it reads “Remnant Oil Operating.”

The story of Remnant is the story of the American oil industry.

The industry’s household names — Chevron, ExxonMobil and others — often reap the biggest profits from any given oil field. As the booms fade and production falls, wells are sold to a string of ever-smaller companies, many of which let the infrastructure fall into disrepair while violations and leaks skyrocket. The number of idled wells soars too, as companies warehouse them to avoid costly cleanup. By this point, regulators’ hands are tied because the bonds states demand to use as leverage are so small. Seeing little incentive to plug wells and get their tiny bonds back, companies slip into bankruptcy court, where executives are protected from their environmental liabilities. When the dust settles, the government is on the hook for the now-orphaned wells.


The practice is so tried-and-true that researchers and activists call it “the playbook.”

As the company’s name implies, Remnant gathered the industry’s dregs into a portfolio of several hundred wells. Drilled decades ago by larger companies, their most productive days were behind them. When Remnant arrived in 2015, it briefly boosted production, but regulatory violations, bad bets and the oil fields’ age caught up with the company. Within four years, Remnant filed for bankruptcy protection, and its leadership shuffled assets and liabilities between companies the executives managed.

Remnant representatives did not respond to ProPublica and Capital & Main’s requests for comment.

Over their lifespans, the wells that remain in the hands of Remnant and a related company generated roughly $2 billion in revenue, when adjusted for inflation, enough to cover the cost of their cleanup many times over. This is according to estimates produced from state production data by ProPublica, Capital & Main and Texas-based petroleum reservoir engineer Dwayne Purvis.

The New Mexico State Land Office sent letters in 2023 demanding that cleanup begin. Remnant’s executives have yet to comply.
Seeking Fortunes

As wildcatters scoured Texas for oil in the 1920s, one hopeful investor christened their well in honor of Saint Rita of Cascia — the patron saint of impossible causes — asking for a miracle. The gusher that followed ignited a drilling frenzy in the Permian Basin, from West Texas to southeastern New Mexico.

By the late 1940s, the Square Lake Pool had come alive among New Mexico’s sand dunes. Anadarko Production Company — now part of the $50 billion Oxy Petroleum — took over the oil field in the 1960s and increased production. To keep the oil and gas flowing, Anadarko turned to unconventional methods: fracturing underground rock, injecting wells with gelled water and frac sand and waterflooding. The chemical treatments continued into the 1980s, but production steadily declined as the wells aged and underground oil reservoirs were depleted.

In 1995, Xeric Oil & Gas Corp. acquired much of the field. Two years later, Xeric transferred the wells to GP II Energy Inc. In the two decades that followed, the wells ping-ponged to CBS Operating Corp., Boaz Energy LLC, Memorial Production Operating LLC, Marker Oil and finally, in 2017, to Remnant.

Remnant was the brainchild of Everett Willard Gray II, Robert Stitzel and Marquis Reed Gilmore Jr., oilmen out of Midland, Texas, the heart of the Permian. They set up shop north of downtown, their office surrounded by those of other oil companies, a politician and banks in a six-story office building rising above a parking lot full of white pickup trucks.

Initial investments in the wells succeeded in reversing the declining production and squeezed out tens of millions of dollars of additional revenue, estimates based on state data show.

But Gray, Stitzel and Gilmore — who did not respond to requests for comment — reduced the workforce that serviced the wells and limited repairs to cut costs. Regulators noted 146 infractions in the years Remnant and a related company operated the wells, according to New Mexico Oil Conservation Division data. Among them: leaks and spills, degraded wells, a lack of infrastructure to contain spills and “contaminated material on location.” The records show Remnant only brought two of the infractions into compliance, but it continued pumping.

Peer-reviewed studies have found that wells emit methane, a greenhouse gas that in the short term has 85 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide, at a higher rate as they move down the oil industry food chain, from majors to thinly capitalized operators like Remnant.

Transferring wells between companies has historically been approved automatically in New Mexico, as long as the company receiving the wells is in compliance with inactive-well rules and has a bond, according to Oil Conservation Division acting Director Dylan Fuge.

As oil fields age and are passed between companies, it’s also common to let wells stand inactive temporarily to wait out a price dip or complete maintenance. But idling is often a prelude to a well being orphaned, and after a few months of inactivity, the chance that a well never produces again rises significantly.

Across the country, more wells are idle than producing, according to an analysis of data from energy software company Enverus.

Despite a New Mexico law that requires companies to plug, restart or get approval to temporarily idle wells that haven’t produced for 15 months, ProPublica and Capital & Main identified more than 3,100 oil and gas wells in the state — 4% of the state’s portfolio — that sit unproductive and out of compliance, a step away from being orphaned.

A bill introduced in this year’s legislative session — written by the Oil Conservation Division, the industry and certain environmental groups — would’ve reformed New Mexico’s Oil and Gas Act, giving the agency more authority to intervene to stop transfers that pose a risk of leaving wells orphaned. The bill died on the floor of the state’s House of Representatives.

Any reforms would likely come too late for the oil fields in Remnant’s hands, where numerous wells are already idle.

Pump jacks operate at dusk near Loco Hills on April 23, 2020 in Eddy County, New Mexico.

 (Photo by PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images)

Hesitant to Regulate

On a brisk November day, ProPublica and Capital & Main reporters examined a Remnant well that, like the company, was listed in state records as inactive. Oil coated the wellhead, rust crept across the pump jack and a faded sign bore Remnant’s coat of arms — a bird of prey with outstretched wings perched on a shield.

Suddenly, the well creaked to life, producing for a dead company. A haze appeared. Methane, typically invisible to the naked eye, leaked in such a high concentration that the air shimmered. A handheld gas detector aimed at the wellhead screeched a warning — the amount of escaping methane had made the air explosive.

That day’s production and emissions never appeared in state records.

ProPublica and Capital & Main reporters visited dozens of Remnant wells and tank batteries — facilities used for oil storage and early stages of processing — scattered across this rural stretch of New Mexico. Multiple sites emitted explosive levels of methane, with one leak clocked at 10 times the concentration at which the gas can explode.

Several wells belched sour hydrogen sulfide at concentrations that maxed out the gas detector, registering levels three times as high as what is “immediately dangerous to life or health,” according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Oil Conservation Division inspectors hadn’t visited some of the wells since 2017, according to agency records.

Two hundred fifty miles northwest of these oil fields, New Mexico’s Democrat-controlled government in Santa Fe has for years made big promises on climate change and the environment. But there has been little action to regulate the industry in ways that could hit the bottom line of the state’s petroleum companies and oilmen like Remnant’s Gray, Stitzel and Gilmore. The taxes and royalties the industry pays, which the state has tied to public education funding, typically account for more than a quarter of the state’s general fund, earning it a nickname — “golden goose.”

This close relationship to the industry cuts across parties. When Republicans were in power, the head of the New Mexico Environment Department left to run the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association. Now, the state’s Democratic leaders take major fossil fuel donations, publicly assert that they will not target the industry with aggressive regulations, and block reform.

State Rep. Joanne Ferrary, a Las Cruces Democrat who has worked on oil legislation, had a simple explanation for what dooms these efforts: money. She pointed to the industry’s spending on lobbying as well as the threat of losing taxes and royalties. “We do get a lot of money from them,” she said, “but those are our resources and they’re not doing us any favors.”

Consider the state’s Office of Natural Resources Trustee, which pursues polluters for financial settlements to clean up the environment. The agency has secured millions of dollars from mines, an Army munitions depot and a wood treatment facility. But it completed just one action for petroleum pollution in decades. Even then, the office only had jurisdiction to pursue a small settlement because a tanker truck flipped on an icy road, spilling refined gasoline and diesel into the Cimarron River.

Legislators attempted to expand the office’s authority in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 and again last year. All those efforts failed.

Ferrary, who sponsored the 2023 bill to grant the trustee more authority over petroleum and certain cancer-causing substances, said the oil and gas industry has “such strong lobbying that we have to negotiate whatever we are trying to do. It always seems to get negotiated down.”

In a recent four-year period, the state’s oil and gas industry spent $11.5 million to influence policy, in addition to employing dozens of lobbyists, according to research from two government accountability nonprofits.

“Lawmakers and regulators appropriately balance the need to hold industry accountable while also ensuring oil and gas operations remain viable,” Frederick Bermudez, the vice president of communications for the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, said in a statement. He added that Remnant is not a member of the trade group and that “bad actors in the industry should be held accountable.”

Regulators argue they’re underfunded and understaffed, while environmental activists point out agencies are sometimes tasked with simultaneously overseeing and advancing the industry. New Mexico records, for example, show that the Oil Conservation Division inspects roughly half the state’s wells annually, but many go years without a visit. Meanwhile, it quickly greenlights requests to drill new wells, generally granting approval for more than 90% of permits within 10 days.

The state does even worse at preparing for the industry’s decline. The division secured about 7% of the tens of millions of dollars of additional bonds it requested from companies in violation of idle well rules, according to a ProPublica and Capital & Main analysis of the agency’s data. (The division said some companies no longer need to hand over the requested bonds because they have since left their wells as orphans for the state to plug. The state has already labeled more than 1,700 wells as orphans.)

The Oil Conservation Division has “limited bandwidth” and has to triage enforcement, Fuge, its acting director, said, adding that a mix of enforcement actions and business decisions lead companies to plug many of their own wells. “We don’t prioritize inactive well actions when the chute’s too deep because we want to devote the resources that we have to other enforcement initiatives.”

“Ill-Prepared for This Last Phase of Life”

By the time regulators took notice of Remnant’s myriad violations and idle wells, it was too late.

Core to oil regulators’ power are bonds, the financial assurances oil companies must set aside to guarantee that wells are plugged. Proper cleanup is expensive, so when bonding levels are low, companies have no incentive to finish cleanup and retrieve their bonds.

To decommission a typical orphan well in New Mexico costs the state about $167,000, according to documents the Oil Conservation Division submitted to the U.S. Department of the Interior. That translates to an $11.8 billion shortfall between the potential future cleanup costs and bonds that companies set aside with the agency, ProPublica and Capital & Main found.

“The state of New Mexico is short,” Fuge said. “We don’t hold sufficient bonding to cover likely plugging liabilities.”

Fuge suggested the shortfall might be smaller, deferring to an environmental group’s lower projection. Elsewhere in state government, the State Land Office in 2022 estimated the gap between bonds and cleanup costs was $8.1 billion.

Based on the per-well cleanup costs Fuge’s agency submitted to the federal government, the wells belonging to Remnant and a related company could cost the state $67 million if they are orphaned. The companies have only set aside about $1.5 million in bonds across three state and federal agencies.

Under current New Mexico rules, companies only need to put up a single bond worth a maximum of $250,000 — no matter how many wells they have — with the Oil Conservation Division. The failed reform bill would’ve increased that cap to $10 million. The division can request additional bonds to cover the increased risk from idle wells, but when it asked Remnant and a related company for about $3 million, the operators put up less than a tenth of that and kept pumping oil.

Weak bonding rules and an unwillingness to take on the industry have created similar shortfalls across the nation.

The Pennsylvania General Assembly in the 1990s, for example, forced the state’s oil regulators to hand back money that oil companies had set aside to plug wells drilled prior to 1985, which numbered in the tens of thousands of wells.

Oklahoma allows oil companies that prove they’re worth at least $50,000 — about the price of one of the ubiquitous pickup trucks cruising the oil fields — to set aside no money to plug their wells.

And Kansas gives companies, no matter how many wells they own, the option of paying a flat $100 annual fee instead of setting aside a bond, as long as they have not committed recent infractions. Seven out of eight companies in the state take this route, leaving an average of less than $13 in bonds for each of the state’s 150,000 unplugged wells. The state’s estimated cleanup costs — which experts said may be low — would mean the state faces about a $1 billion shortfall between the bonds and plugging costs.

“Regulations that may have worked well enough in the past have left the public and the industry ill-prepared for this last phase of life for millions of old wells,” Purvis, the petroleum reservoir engineer, said. “Left unchanged, current regulations and practices will continue to accrue liabilities that will ultimately fall on taxpayers.”

All told, oil drillers have set aside only $2.7 billion in bonds with the 15 states that account for nearly all the country’s oil and gas production and $204 million with the Bureau of Land Management, the main federal oil regulator. The expected cost to plug and clean up wells in those states is $151.3 billion.

ProPublica and Capital & Main obtained and analyzed more than a thousand pages of states’ applications for funding to plug orphan wells as part of the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The documents reveal for the first time states’ own estimates of the cleanup costs in a way that allows states to be compared.

“You can give us probably the entire infrastructure act funding — $4.7 billion — and we’d probably spend that in Pennsylvania,” Kurt Klapkowski, head of the commonwealth’s Office of Oil and Gas Management, told a national meeting of regulators in October.

Some states acknowledged that accumulated costs from unplugged wells are high but said they could be mitigated by additional money in the states’ orphan well funds — which often contain several million dollars and were not included in this study — and by tools meant to ensure companies, rather than taxpayers, plug the wells. For example, Wyoming significantly increases the bonds required of operators when wells go idle.

“Wyoming is fully bonded to be protective of the wells” under state oversight, Tom Kropatsch, oil and gas supervisor of the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, said in an email, pointing to the fact that most wells that have been plugged in Wyoming were plugged by the industry, not the state. “The bonds we hold are adjusted on an ongoing basis as our agency conducts an annual bond review of each operator.”

North Dakota regulators, with the luxury of a still highly profitable industry, have resources to more rigorously police oil. Lynn Helms, director of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, said this includes enough inspectors to observe well plugging, determine whether idle wells require additional bonding and scrutinize proposed well transfers to smaller operators, which are “the biggest risk.”

Helms said the state aims to cover as much as 10% of future plugging costs through bonds and orphan well funds, although his department is still working to reach that level.

Both North Dakota and Wyoming hold more bonds and face lower impending liability than New Mexico.

“When the bottom goes out of this oil and gas production economy, who’s going to be left holding that bag?” New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard asked.

“I Got Big-Time Screwed Over”

In July 2019, less than four years after Gray, Stitzel and Gilmore began buying up wells, Remnant was in bad shape. Its wells were deteriorating and production was declining. The owners had made a costly gamble on an oil sale and the company’s bank demanded payment on a debt, according to court testimony from Gray.

So Remnant employed a tactic that has saved the oil industry billions — its owners filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with a court in Texas.

The Bankruptcy Code is meant to protect jobs, creditors and the economy by allowing companies to stabilize during rough patches. But bankruptcy court is a key step in the industry’s playbook, as it has become an oil field escape hatch, effectively allowing companies with aging wells to sell off valuable assets while orphaning wells in need of immediate cleanup. Companies can also stop the clock on many enforcement actions.

Between 2015 and 2021, 256 oil and gas producers entered bankruptcy protection across the country, carrying with them about $175 billion in debt, according to Haynes and Boone, a law firm that produced the most comprehensive research on oil field bankruptcies. (Haynes and Boone is representing ProPublica in several Texas lawsuits.)

Court records show the bankrupt Remnant companies owed millions of dollars to hundreds of creditors — oil field service companies, the New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department, counties, banks, trucking companies and a local air conditioning and heating company.

But in the year leading up to the bankruptcies, court filings show, Remnant paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees to companies belonging to at least two of the men who ran the company and cut numerous paychecks to a daughter, son, cousin and daughter-in-law of various executives.

In April 2020, unsecured creditors who were owed millions of dollars had the case converted to Chapter 7, meaning a trustee would take over, liquidate the company’s assets and pay back creditors where possible.

Debts relating to cleaning up the environment or repaying labor “get pretty low priority” in bankruptcy cases, explained Josh Macey, a law professor at the University of Chicago who studies bankruptcy and reviewed ProPublica and Capital & Main’s findings. To Macey, one solution to unfavorable bankruptcy rules is bonds, as they’re protected even in bankruptcy.

“Bonding requirements have not proven to be sufficient,” he said, “but if they were, it would make bankruptcy irrelevant.”

Arturo Carrasco was one of Remnant’s unsecured creditors, meaning a long list of debts would have to be settled before he saw any money. Carrasco, now retired, owned Art’s Hot Oil Services, an oil field maintenance company with a handful of drivers and trucks out of Lovington, New Mexico. By the time Remnant hired Carrasco’s company to work on its wells, most were “already depleted,” he said.

Remnant only paid him a little at a time and never the full amount it owed, Carrasco said.

Carrasco filed claims for more than $165,000 in the bankruptcy, according to court records, and that didn’t include another $50,000 in unpaid expenses like fuel, he said. Concerned his company might go under, Carrasco worked “double time” to make up for the lost income. With no expectation of recovering money via the bankruptcy, he briefly fantasized about throwing a chain around Remnant’s pump jacks and pulling them down.

“I got big-time screwed over,” he said.

Graveyards of Wells

Three months after the judge ordered that Remnant liquidate, a buyer called Acacia Resources LLC wired $402,000 to the trustee, completing the purchase of Remnant’s assets.

The new company was run by familiar names — Stitzel and Gilmore, Remnant’s former chief operating officer and president, state records show. Business filings and his LinkedIn profile suggest Gray left the venture to launch a helium and natural gas company.

“All they did was file bankruptcy. Then they went to the bank and bought it at a cheaper price, and they’re still producing,” Carrasco said. “How can that be allowed?”

Fuge, the New Mexico oil regulator, said the companies are the “subject of prime enforcement attention” but did not comment further. And a Bureau of Land Management spokesperson said Remnant had no outstanding violations and the agency was not preparing to forfeit the company’s bonds.

The details of Acacia’s operations are murky. The on-the-ground situation doesn’t always match New Mexico’s data, while state records don’t align with federal records.

But Remnant’s business practices are similar to those of any number of undercapitalized drillers holding portfolios of old wells. So the State Land Office began a campaign to bring such operators into compliance to protect the state from shouldering the burden of even more orphan wells.

Buried amid pages of infractions in Remnant’s files, agency staff noted that satellite imagery appeared to show a spill at a Remnant well in the Drickey Queen Sand Unit. In November, the agency wrote to Gray, Stitzel and others, demanding they begin plugging wells in the field.

Jaclyn McLean, an attorney representing Acacia, responded with a proposal — Acacia would plug a few wells per year and pay back some money it owed for pumping oil on expired leases if the state would renew those leases and reduce the amount the company owed. With Gilmore, who was a manager of both Remnant and Acacia, copied on the letter, McLean blamed prior management’s “severe inaction” and promised that “the new management team seeks to maintain professionalism, integrity, and authenticity.” (McLean did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Tell your client to get serious,” the agency responded.

Still unplugged, Remnant’s wells in the Drickey Queen Sand Unit stood eerily silent during a recent site visit, the bellowing and bleating of cattle the only sound as they grazed among the apparent orphans. At one of the pump jacks, which had not drawn oil in more than eight years, pieces of metal had corroded and fallen off. Lines used for collecting oil in preparation for sale lay in the dirt. They connected to nothing.
Methodology

To investigate what leads to oil and gas wells being orphaned, ProPublica and Capital & Main filed more than 55 public records requests with state and federal agencies and toured oil fields in New Mexico, Texas and California. We interviewed dozens of petroleum engineers, researchers, community members and government officials, including the leadership of oil agencies in Louisiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

To determine the magnitude of the shortfall between cleanup costs and bonds, we needed to answer several questions: how many wells are unplugged, how much money have companies set aside in bonds and how much does it cost to plug and remediate a well. The analysis focused on the top 15 oil- and gas-producing states because, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, they accounted for 99% of the country’s output in recent years. Those states are Texas, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Louisiana, Colorado, West Virginia, Ohio, Wyoming, Alaska, California, Arkansas, Utah and Kansas.

With petroleum reservoir engineer Dwayne Purvis, we analyzed data from energy software company Enverus to determine the number of unplugged wells in each state, conservatively defining them as either clearly active or in some stage of idling. We checked these figures against previous estimates, such as what states self-reported to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission.

To calculate plugging costs, we used the estimates that states reported to the U.S. Department of the Interior in their notices of intent to apply for Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funds. We checked these figures against states’ next round of applications, Native American tribes’ applications and hundreds of orphan well plugging contracts from across the country. The agreements showed the detailed mechanics of the work, such as where cement plugs were placed, how surface infrastructure was removed and what post-remediation environmental monitoring was completed. Plugging costs varied widely depending on the depth, condition and geography of the well, but costs ballooned to the high six figures or even the seven-figure range when projects faced unanticipated obstacles, such as cannonballs having been dropped into a well as an improvised plug, wells igniting and the need to tear up city streets to plug some wells.

For bonding figures, we obtained the 15 states’ datasets of all active bonds tied to oil and gas well plugging, remediation and reclamation. We relied on figures reported by the Government Accountability Office for the value of bonds held by the Bureau of Land Management. We requested, but did not receive, that agency’s data, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs didn’t answer questions about bonds on tribal land. We didn’t include other jurisdictions’ bonds, as those are much smaller. (For example, New Mexico’s State Land Office requires bonds but only holds $20,000 for Remnant’s wells.)

To check our methodology, we gave a 10-member panel of petroleum engineers, law professors and former regulators an opportunity to comment on the findings. These experts have worked or currently work with the California Geologic Energy Management Division, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Texas Christian University, the Carbon Tracker Initiative and other research organizations. They widely accepted the final methodology. The lead oil regulatory agency from all 15 states also had a chance to review the findings. Some states’ data showed slightly different numbers of unplugged wells than Enverus’ data, but we used the Enverus data because it is standardized and not all states provided well counts. Regulators also emphasized that bonds are an insurance policy not meant to cover 100% of the cost, that states won’t have to plug every well because the industry will plug many and that other agencies also hold bonds.

When estimating the total revenue generated by Remnant’s and Acacia’s wells, we used New Mexico Oil Conservation Division data to tell us how much oil and gas each well produced. Because some production wasn’t assigned a year, we worked with Purvis to model a likely production decline curve. We multiplied that by each year’s oil and gas prices, mainly found in Energy Information Administration data, and adjusted that for inflation, using Bureau of Labor Statistics figures.

Finally, our emissions testing fieldwork was completed using a handheld Bascom-Turner Gas Explorer Detector. We consulted Amy Townsend-Small, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Cincinnati, to formulate the testing plan. We checked the readings with the manufacturer, whose employees said they had never seen their equipment register such high levels. They gathered in an office to call our reporter and ask if he was all right (he was because he wore an acid gas and organic vapor respirator around the wells).

Mark Olalde is a reporter at ProPublica covering the environment in the Southwest.
Nick Bowlin is a freelance journalist and a correspondent for High Country News.

Commons Chaos Aggravates Tensions In British Society – OpEd

 February 27, 2024  

By Arab News

By Chris Doyle

Winston Churchill once proclaimed that “MP” — as in, Member of Parliament — were the proudest two letters anyone could carry after their name. One has to wonder, after another shambolic week in British politics, how many of the 650 current MPs share that sentiment, let alone what the public think. Palestinians, meanwhile, have become all too familiar with British political failure to have any expectation at all.

What could be worse than politicians squabbling and shouting over procedural wrangles when debating a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, in a situation where a possible genocide of the Palestinian people is occurring. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are being starved to death, ferreting around for grass, weeds and animal feed to survive, while facing the ravages of disease and a huge Israeli bombardment. Meanwhile, elected British politicians cannot muster the barest slither of decency required to put petty party squabbles aside so that the House of Commons can speak with one voice and call for a ceasefire.

As the UK’s only ever British-Palestinian MP Layla Moran observed: “There I am, with my family trapped in that church in Gaza, desperately seeking some sort of resolution — and all I wanted to say to them was Parliament did you proud. But we just didn’t. It was a complete failure of a day.”

Last week’s vote was triggered by the Scottish National Party, the third party in Westminster. It had an opportunity to put down a motion to be voted upon, even though the outcome would not be binding. It did something similar in November, when it forced a vote on an amendment to the King’s speech, which led to 10 Labour Party frontbenchers resigning.

Both the government and Labour’s positions had shifted before the vote from opposing any ceasefire to supporting humanitarian pauses. In Labour’s case, Keir Starmer, the party leader and probable next prime minister, even talked of a cessation of hostilities, but could not bring himself to call for an immediate ceasefire.

So, as Palestinians were being slaughtered, British political parties engaged in a toe-curling battle of semantics. Should they be pushing for a ceasefire, a truce or a pause? Should these be bilateral, immediate, credible or sustainable? Last week’s SNP motion wanted an “immediate ceasefire.” The Labour amendment wanted an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” and the government wanted an “immediate humanitarian pause.”

The SNP motion reflected the party’s long-term position. However, the Labour Party, the lead opposition, could not agree to it. Why? Because it accused Israel of collective punishment. However, anyone with even the barest scintilla of an understanding of the situation on the ground in the Occupied Territories knows that Israel has been using collective punishment not just over the last 141 days, but for years, notably with the 17-year blockade of the Gaza Strip. It is a clear breach of international law.

Just in case the formulation of the motion was not enough to fight over, the speaker also caused controversy by breaking with convention by allowing a vote on amendments to the SNP motion. In the end, due to arcane parliamentary conventions and the Conservatives and SNP walking out, only the Labour amendment was voted upon. The speaker, who later apologized to the Commons, has survived in his post for now but is massively weakened.

The SNP hopes to procure a debate this week. However, there is unlikely to be a vote on the motion, denying it the opportunity to embarrass Labour. Starmer had feared that he would face a huge rebellion in his Labour ranks. The Tories also worried that they too might have MPs voting with the SNP.

All of which leaves those who care about the carnage in Gaza holding their head in their hands. If you examine the various party positions, there is very little difference in terms of substance. Each leader has said that they want to see an immediate end to the fighting, the release of hostages held in Gaza and a political process leading to a two-state solution. They have all demanded that more humanitarian aid be allowed into Gaza.

It highlights the confrontational mode of British parliamentary politics. The two main parties face off against each other. The Commons does not do compromise. In most European political systems, due to their electoral voting systems, coalition governments mean that compromise is a daily feature of political life. Not so in Britain or indeed the US. In a grown-up, mature political system, a single motion that all the parties agreed to should have been drafted in advance.

Where does this leave British politics related to the Middle East? From the outset, party leaders have all too often put domestic politics above statesmanship and responsible decision-making in the face of a serious international crisis. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave Israel his “unequivocal support” — something no leader should ever give to one party to a conflict.

As the Conservatives have done before, much of this was designed to create a problem for Labour, to exacerbate divisions within the leading opposition party. These duly opened up as Starmer refused to call for a ceasefire and did not condemn Israel’s use of a total siege on Gaza, denying civilians water, food, power and medicines. No doubt Starmer was fearful over accusations that the Labour Party would get caught up in a new antisemitism crisis, following the one that bedeviled his predecessor. But the common feature was that neither of the two leaders took their position based on the situation on the ground. It is an election year and it seems like elections trump possible genocide.

All of this aggravates tensions in British society. Anger is high and respect for politicians is low. One of the reasons the speaker gave when explaining his position was that he believed the Labour amendment had to be voted upon because the lives of MPs were under threat. Was this the case? As yet, no evidence has been presented or any detail given, nor has anyone been reported as arrested for intimidating a politician. But it is true, many MPs are fearful. Some media reports claim Starmer told the speaker that, unless he called their amendment, Labour would not back him to continue after the next election.

The fear of attacks on MPs was the cue for yet another huge distraction. Tory politicians, in particular, started claiming that hard-line Islamists were threatening the British political system. It triggered a further wave of appalling anti-Muslim comments from British politicians, with former Home Secretary Suella Braverman even claiming that “the Islamists, the extremists and the antisemites are in charge now.”

This rampant Islamophobia explains as much as anything why Britain has taken such an immoral and irresponsible stance on Palestine since Oct. 7. Too many politicians still do not see Palestinians as like them, as real humans who deserve the rights and respect accorded to others. Many of them do not deserve to have the letters MP after their name.

• Chris Doyle is director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding in London. X: @Doylech

Ancient Egyptians Celebrated the Feast of Drunkenness with Blood-Red Beer

One of history’s earliest mixed drinks was made to appease a ferocious goddess.

BY DIANA HUBBELLFEBRUARY 26, 2024


This red ochre-tinted beer was served in honor of the goddess Hathor.
COURTESY DORA GOLDSMITH
THIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED FROM THE FEBRUARY 24, 2024, EDITION OF GASTRO OBSCURA’S FAVORITE THINGS .

There’s a whole lot of hair-splitting about who came up with the first cocktail.

A quick Google search will reveal a litany of opinions. Some claim that the Sazerac, which first appeared around the 1830s, holds the distinction. Others would say that the unnamed concoction of spirits, sugar, and bitters—essentially, an Old-Fashioned—published by an anonymous American bartender in an 1806 newspaper is the winner.

Yet there are plenty of older examples of mixed drinks, from the hot ale flips served in New England taverns in the late 1600s, to English possets, which date back to the Middle Ages. Plus, people on the Indian subcontinent (who figured out distillation earlier than their European counterparts) were mixing up punches centuries earlier.

Last year, I spoke with cocktail historian Amanda Schuster, who has a recipe for a boozy Scottish drink with roots dating back to the 1400s in her book Signature Cocktails. She pointed out that people have been mixing stuff with alcohol to make it taste better for a very, very long time

.

Dora Goldsmith is an Egyptologist at Berlin’s Freie Universität. 

COURTESY DORA GOLDSMITH

That got me thinking: just how old can mixology be?

According to Dora Goldsmith, an Egyptologist at Berlin’s Freie Universität, the ancient Egyptians were making mixed alcoholic beverages in the Ptolemaic Dynasty, around 300 BC.

While there’s evidence of distilled liquor dating back to 800 BC in parts of Asia, Egyptian “cocktails” more resembled fortified wines and beers. And when the debauched Feast of Drunkenness rolled around, these fragrant, sweet elixirs flowed freely.
Sacred Knowledge

Goldsmith has translated what may be instructions for two such libations from a religious text. “This is a hymn, as far as the text genre goes, but behind that hymn are traces of a recipe,” Goldsmith explains.

Versions of that same sacred song, known as “The Menu Song,” were chiseled onto the temples of Dendera, Philae, and Athribis. “It was recorded many times, which means it was important to the ancient Egyptians.”

As Goldsmith points out, four other Egyptologists have published analyses of this text before her and each has walked away with a subtly different interpretation of what it means. “The truth is that no one is incorrect and no one is correct,” she says.

This ancient hymn was inscribed on the Temple of Dendera.

NICK BRUNDLE PHOTOGRAPHY / GETTY IMAGES

The ingredients and steps are cloaked in metaphors and poetic language. But it’s not an accident that the text is tricky to follow.

“This belonged into the realm of restricted knowledge. [The ancient Egyptians] believed in the notion that knowledge is power. One way of immortalizing a document that is important while keeping it a secret is to write it in stone, but in a way that is very hard to understand.”

Goldsmith believes that hidden behind these layers of meaning are recipes for preparing two drinks, one for the mortals and one for the gods. The former may have been served at the Feast of Drunkenness, ancient Egypt’s wildest bacchanal.

“The Menu Song was probably sung on these [feast] days, while they drank this fragrant beer, and were in complete ecstasy,” Goldsmith says. “What is important to understand is that beer-brewing here is a mythological act. The brewing itself ensures that the cosmic order remains intact.”
The Feast of Drunkenness

Before we look at the drinks themselves, let’s talk about Hathor, the goddess for whom they were created. This most ancient and powerful of goddesses had a wide mythical jurisdiction over music, sexuality, fertility, motherhood, as well as precious metals such as gold and fragrances including myrrh and labdamum.

“She has two sides,” Goldsmith says. “On the one hand, she’s very loving, but she can also be a raging lunatic. She’s a cute little kitty cat one day and a raging lioness the next.”

Hathor was also the goddess of intoxication. In the myth of the Destruction of Mankind, Ra, the sun god, orders Hathor to slaughter humanity for their lack of reverence. In this tale, she becomes Sekhmet, a lioness goddess (the two deities are sometimes used interchangeably in ancient Egyptian mythology and share attributes).

In ancient Egypt, beer brewing was women’s work. 

WERNER FORMAN / GETTY IMAGES

“Hathor was bloodthirsty, so she was very happy with the task,” Goldsmith says. Before long, the goddess was rampaging out of control. “Ra told her ‘Enough of the killings,’ but she didn’t want to stop,” Goldsmith says.

To halt the carnage, the sun god resorted to trickery. One version of the story recounts that Ra flooded a field of barley and allowed it to ferment, while another claims he simply poured out 7,000 jars of beer. In either case, Ra cleverly dyed the beer crimson using red ochre, a type of edible clay rich in iron oxide.

“When Hathor arrived, she started drinking what she thought was blood,” Goldsmith says. After guzzling the better part of a field of beer, the goddess became too drunk to continue her murder spree and took a nap, thus saving humanity.
Continuing the Ritual

In honor of Ra’s intervention, ancient Egyptians would celebrate each year by drinking lots and lots of beer. By all accounts, the Feast of Drunkenness lived up to its name.

“People would get so drunk that they would climb on the temples,” Goldsmith says. “It was a task on this day to get completely drunk, not just a little, but so much so that you really didn’t know what was going on anymore. [The idea was that] in this state of complete intoxication, you would be able to perceive the goddess better for who she is.”

The Menu Drink included red ochre, beer brewed from flatbreads, malt, dates, date syrup, black cumin seeds, and other ingredients. 

COURTESY DORA GOLDSMITH

It’s important to remember that beer brewing was a vital part of life throughout much of the ancient world. It was also historically women’s work. Both Ninkasi, the ancient Sumerian goddess of brewing, and Nephthys, another ancient Egyptian goddess associated with beer, were powerful, feminine beings deemed worthy of veneration.

Goldsmith attempted to recreate the elixir that got the population so wildly intoxicated by following 18 steps laid out in the hymn. Each refers to a part of the earthly beer-making process as well as brewing a drink for the divine realm. The imagined drink for the goddess herself included wine enhanced with costly labdanum resin and gold.

For the mere mortals, the text faithfully describes the steps of brewing beer, starting by soaking flatbreads in water and allowing them to ferment, a practice archeologists believe was common in ancient Egyptian brewing.

Malt adds a distinctive flavor to the Menu Drink. 

COURTESY DORA GOLDSMITH

From there, the beer gets a few specific enhancements: red ochre to commemorate the myth and lend a striking color, dates and date syrup to lend sweetness, black cumin seeds for an earthy flavor, and mastic and myrrh to perfume the whole mixture.

Although there is no record of the exact quantities of each ingredient, modern-day drinkers could easily make their own approximation. All of these ingredients are edible and available to purchase online.

Goldsmith plans to publish additional details about her versions of the recipes, but until then, is selling kits containing cocktail ingredients and instructions upon email request.

“Both recipes are representations of the goddess Hathor,” Goldsmith says. The result is both laden with symbolism and a pretty tasty beer cocktail. “Beer brewing [in this case] is a mythological act,” Goldsmith says. “The brewing itself ensures that the cosmic order remains intact.”

TWO OTHER GODDESSES OF THE BLOODY FEAST ARE:

THE SUMERIAN / CAANANITE GODDESS ANAT

AND THE EGYPTIAN GODDESS SEKHMET

PML-N’s Maryam Nawaz becomes first woman CM in Pakistan, calls it 'victory of every woman'

WION Web Team
Islamabad, Pakistan

Updated: Feb 27, 2024

It is being alleged that the journalist was pressured by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz's (PML-N) leader to “cut out” the portions where she seemed visibly perturbed by the question. 

Imran Khan and his associates claim that the national elections on February 8 were rigged against them, although the country's election body denies this

Maryam Nawaz, a senior leader of Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and the daughter of three-time former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, on Monday (Feb 26) became the first-ever woman Chief Minister of a province in the country.

Maryam, who was elected to head the Punjab province, called it "honour" for every woman in the country. Her election to head the country's most populous province also hints at her future as the post has long been a stepping stone to becoming the country's prime minister.

Maryam, the 50-year-old senior vice president of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party, took oath as the Punjab Chief Minister at a ceremony at the Governor House in the presence of her father Nawaz Sharif and uncle Shehbaz Sharif

Also read: Pakistan woman escapes mob lynching over 'controversial' attire after woman police officer intervenes

The election was boycotted by the opposition Sunni Ittehad Council party backed by jailed former prime minister Imran Khan.

She secured 220 votes in the 371-seat provincial assembly, the Punjab assembly speaker said as he announced the results.

Khan and his associates claim that the national elections on February 8 were rigged against them, although the country's election body denies this.

Watch: India's Operation Bandar: 5th anniversary of Balakot Airstrikes

"HISTORY MADE! Maryam Nawaz Sharif takes oath as Punjab's FIRST EVER female Chief Minister! A giant leap for Pakistan," her party said in a post on X.

During her speech, Maryam also said that she didn't want to take "revenge" against her political rivals who jailed her along with members of her family, including her father.

In a veiled reference to former Army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa and former Supreme Court chief justice of Pakistan Saqib Nisar, she said, "I neither have a feeling of revenge or vengeance and my journey includes my arrest, my father's arrest, my mother’s passing away."


(With inputs from agencies)

Businesses at standstill as workers begin nationwide strike in Guinea

Workers in West African country demand higher wages, release of trade unionist, cut in food prices

James Tasamba |26.02.2024 - 


KIGALI, Rwanda

Businesses were paralyzed in Guinea's capital Conakry on Monday as workers began a nationwide strike, demanding higher wages and lower food prices, local media reported.

The Guinean Trade Union Movement announced the indefinite general strike last week involving the public, private, and informal sectors.

Their demands include higher wages, the release of trade unionist Sekou Jamal Pendessa, and a cut in food prices.

Pendessa was arrested in January for “participating in an unauthorized protest.”

“On the first day of the strike, it looks like a public holiday in the country’s Kaloum administrative district with all activities at a standstill. The transport network is disrupted and the streets are almost empty,” news site Africaguinee reported.

Shops and banks in the West African country remained closed with “security personnel deployed in front of each government ministry.”

The strike comes days after Gen. Mamady Doumbouya, who took power in a September 2021 coup, dissolved the transitional government.